Did Theatrics Outstage the Clothes on This Season's Runways?

Ahh, show season. That bi-annual, break-neck paced flurry of all things fashion and its court (The parties! The peacocking! The inevitable flu-like illness that, if you're lucky, stays away until Paris dims its lights!). The transatlantic arc serves not only as a platform for the world's top designers to present their next-up wares, but also as a mouthpiece for the industry's future—collective aesthetics, moods, shapes, colors, and more, arriving soon in a photo editorial near you.

Yesterday marked the end of spring/summer 2014's turn in the spotlight, and, to say it left us breathless would be an understatement. There were circuit-wide iterations of fringe, creatively rendered pleats, feathers fit for an urban aviary (Junya Watanabe's pheasant caps, anyone?), and new takes on athleticism, all of which will surely equate to retail mintage. Yet in processing these collections, now that all is said and done, we've noticed that perhaps the season's biggest takeaway concerns a more maximal, meta-environmental theme: that of the marquee catwalk performance.

Putting the "show" in runway show took different forms. Rick Owens threw away convention entirely, hiring step teams from American universities to flex their way through his spring array. The act electrified Paris, as well as Instagram's video feature. These were "real" women, by no means blade-thin, and more diverse than any other casting this season. What's more is that all of their mug-facing and limb-thrashing perfectly accentuated Owens' designs (cue that aforementioned note on hyper-lux sportiness). Good on Rick—it was certainly provocative, but more than anything, it was reinvigorating and fun. He is, after all, just a big kid beneath all that leather.

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Jean-Paul Gaultier, too, jazzed the City of Light with his haute take on Dancing With the Stars. He cast Coco Rocha as Danny Zuko in Grease, Karlie Kloss as an exquisite vogue dancer, and Lais Ribeiro as a remarkably adept tango dancer. And where cheesiness could've easily trumped practicality, let alone sophistication, the set was designed so that the models' had their theatrical moment and then strutted their stuff, allowing for your standard catwalk photo-op. A lovely formula, indeed.

But is straying so far from the "normal" a smart endeavor? It certainly runs the risk of overriding the point of it all, which is to clearly present clothing, both immediately for the industry, and soon thereafter for the world. "It's important to shake people up once in a while," says Fern Mallis, the wünder-producer who put New York Fashion Week on the map. "However, when the spectacle triumphs over the collection, it's not a great thing. But when the collection is clever, and the production supports its smartness and represents its vision and helps create additional buzz, then it makes sense."

To that sentiment, there were plenty of shows that mixed both traditional staging with intelligent add-ons. Prabal Gurung, for example, marched his models out all at once, encasing them in a suspended plastic chamber. Once aligned, each girl then left her protective confines for her circuit 'round the runway. It was, for lack of a better descriptor, magnetic. Mallis herself remarked, "[He] did an excellent job displaying beautiful clothes in an interesting way."

"I wanted to ensure the preservation of elegance," said Gurung, citing the photographer Bert Stern's "Last Sitting" with Marilyn Monroe, who is certainly a beacon of time-gone grandeur, yet whose memory and person is still thriving today. "The plastic was designed to illustrate this, with allusions to a clinical, sterile future that still contains these beautiful creatures."

Others who succeeded in combining theatrics with the standard runway fare? Opening Ceremony with its rip-roaring Grand Prix of six-figure cars, Givenchy with its smoldering auto wreck, Chanel with its Museum of Fine Arts, and Marc Jacobs at both his own label's black-lit Gotham beach party and Louis Vuitton's blacked-out funeral (of sorts). But with such gimmickry—on-point and talk-worthy as it may be—the question of whether or not designers are knowingly piling on props and pageantry to garner more hype or to shield their collection's weaknesses or to procure more Instagram hashtags remains. Mallis concedes that, yes, "Joseph Altuzarra did a very conservative presentation, but the clothing was so terrific, it didn't even matter." Hmm...

Gurung, though, sums it up best, pin-pointing an equilibrium between the product and the posturing: "We must guarantee that each season the runway show is entirely reflective of the collection, and whether through staging, music, casting, hair and makeup, etc., we must succeed in transporting the audience into the world being presented."